


Who knows where/Who knows when

by CurlicueCal



Series: Packstuck AU [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Brother Feels, Character Death Fix, Demons, Fairy Tale Style, M/M, demon!Caliborn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-03 22:13:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1758279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurlicueCal/pseuds/CurlicueCal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>And you still remember what it is to catch a soul in your hands, to tear it loose or bind it tight, tie it round with puppet strings.</i><br/>--<br/>Dave dies. Bro fixes it.<br/>Caliborn plays a game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Where

**Author's Note:**

> Trying something a little different!
> 
> obvs content note for character death but I don't write sadstuck so shhh everything will be fine.  
> or, you know, bro and caliborn definition of fine.

You don't know where you're going.

 _It's a story,_ Roxy told you, once upon a time, long ago.  _You have to tell the right beginning to get to the right ending._

She'd smacked you on the head right after, told you sharply to _remember, Di-Stri.  Sheez.  I can’t remember it for you._

So you climb this mountain trail, staggering doggedly on through trees and rocks on a road to nowhere because you don't know the path but you know where you need to be.

On your shoulder, the crow.  In your arms, the corpse.

You carried him when he was small. 

Now your shoulders ache and your feet stumble numbly and your laboring breath draws needles through each slashed and bleeding wound in your sides.  The day is hot but he's long since grown cold in your arms.  It doesn't matter.

You can carry him now.  As far as it takes.

The crow huddles close by your ear, shocky and subdued.  Iridescence trembles across black feathers.

"Hush-a-bye, Davey-boy, I'll get everything fixed.  I’ll fix it.”  It's more a mumble than a croon, the words out of time and out of place, spoken across years to the child he was, not the adolescent he’s become, but you circle back to them time and again.  You spin him fragments of tale-songs and murmured rhymes, a confused patter of noise designed to soothe.  The words tangle in your dizzy brain. 

Above all you keep climbing.

\---

You reach a divergence in the trail.  Unfamiliar crossroads in unfamiliar territory and you hesitate, unsure.  But, no, you know this one.  You know how this should go.  Your feet turn away from the easy, sloping path, towards jagged rocks and tangled brush.  The right story needs the right path.  Anything worth doing hurts.

Anything worth getting _costs._

The crow on your shoulder mantles and refolds its wings, restless or anxious.  The tips of primaries catch the low rays of the sun, black feathers flaming gold and orange along the edges, like fire licking in.

“’s’all right, s’all right,” you say in a voice grown raspy.  It’s not, not really, not at all, but it will be.  You’ll make it be.

It was your fuck up, so it’s your price to pay. 

You’ve just got to find a dealer that will take your coin.

A demon to deal for a life.

\---

The bandits jumped you both not half a mile from town, just a bunch of scruffy, two-bit mercenaries and thieves, not great odds but you’ve faced worse, and you’ve got each other for back up.  It was their mistake to assume two people on the road alone would make easy pickings.  Bad luck them, but worst luck you.  In minutes only the fight was over, the remaining bandits abandoning their too-dangerous prey--and Dave was bleeding out on the road before you. 

It was skill, not misstep that put him between that final, unseen archer’s quarrel and your back.  Choice and sacrifice.  Dave’s fast, like you trained him, talented and so damn reckless-brave, and you didn’t know pride could break you open from the inside like this, shatter your heart and leave you hollowed out and wrecked.

You knelt in the dirt and slaughter of the road, your palms pressed flat around the shaft in his heart, like you could put him back together with your own two hands, like you could catch the life pumping steadily out of him, escaping into the dirt with each faltering heartbeat.

"It’s all right,” you had told him then.  “You did good.  It's okay, li’l bro.  I’ve got this.  I’ll take it from here.”

Among the corpses, crows cawed and flapped, early arrivers to welcome the dead.  Sharp beaks dived down to pluck at torn flesh.

You gathered your jacket in fingers painted red with your only brother’s blood, pulled the edges of fabric together like a net.

“It’s all right,” you promised him.  “I’ll fix it.”

\---

The trail ends but you keep climbing.  You’re playing out a tale and this story has no room for doubts or wavering.  You leave the path that’s petered out behind you and press on through clinging trees and over rough-edged rocks.  Your hands slip, and slip again, your arms trembling with fatigue.  You won’t drop him.  You won’t leave him.

A stone turns under your foot, or perhaps your leg just betrays you.  You stagger, one knee striking the ground in a burst of pain.

On your shoulder the crow flutters and rebalances.  A sharp beak runs along your temple, loosening the stiff locks from your scalp and forehead, preening away dried clots of blood.  The black of the bird’s feathers is entirely gone now, subsumed by the flame-bright golds and oranges that color it all the way through.  Lit from within.

You make it to your feet again.  You shift your burden (your charge, your ward, your precious baby bro), hefting the dead weight from your arms to your free shoulder.  “s’all right, Davey,” you tell the corpse, tell the crow.  “I got you.”

\---

When you were very small you learned to take the pieces of yourself that didn’t fit and hide them away, put them somewhere safe where they couldn’t be touched.  You never thought of it as magic because _you_ never changed.  In pieces or in synchrony your soul remained your own.  You broke yourself and the world never broke you.

When you were older you found new weapons and different games and you learned how to hide without hiding at all.   You wrapped yourself in riddles and honesty and found that hardly anybody ever solved the puzzles when the answers were placed in plain sight.

You no longer step outside yourself and you’ve stopped placing watchful eyes in the objects around you …but you still put a breath of yourself into every tale-song you spin.

And you still remember what it is to catch a soul in your hands, to tear it loose or bind it tight, tie it round with puppet strings.

You don’t have the power to stop a life from ending.  A soul can’t continue without a body to sustain it.

So you watched while your brother bled and died on that road and then you caught his soul and you bound it into the crow.

\--

The second time you fall, you find you can’t get up again.  You try, over and over, but the earth pulls you down, holds you panting to a hard plane of gravel and dirt.

It’s cold, or maybe it isn’t.  You’re not sure anymore.  The sinking sun sends fingers of red evening light threading through the trees, stroking edges of warm color onto the mountain face.  Your own fingers, on the rock, leave red stripes.  If you’re bleeding, you can’t feel it.

You have to get up.

You can’t.

Your brother’s body is beside you, cold, but you can still feel the way his soul burned you all through and you think you’re going to lay next to him die and then you’ll have failed him twice.

Something scratches on the rocks in front of you.

There’s a rustle and more scratching.  A sharp tug at your hair, and you raise your head, finally.  The crow scuttles back, hopping and fluttering on the stone in front of you, head cocked to watch you from one small, gleaming eye.  The flame-orange of its feathers has gone halfway to white at the tips, like purest ash, the soul inside burning out the life of the bird by fractions.  The crow bobs anxiously, forward and back, tilts its head the other direction to look at you with its other eye.

It opens its beak and makes a series of hoarse noises, soft and urging.

You blink blearily.

The crow makes a harsh noise.  It darts forward, beak stabbing sharp and fierce into your hand.  _Get up, get up_.

You drag in a breath.  Right.

“’kay,” you say aloud, your voice as much a croak as the crow’s, “got you.”

You can’t stand, but with a concentrated effort you roll the body onto your back, distributing the weight across every aching muscle.  You press blood-smeared palms into the earth and rock up to your elbows, to your knees.  You firm your limbs beneath you.

You crawl. 

You climb.

The crow rustles white and orange feathers and flutters ahead of you, watching you with worried eyes.

\--

You’re no longer cold.

The bird flies ahead, returns, again and again, urging.

Your thoughts tangle and glitter in your head, strange broken shards of present and past blending kaleidoscopically together until you can’t determine which is which.  Once upon a time there was a boy and girl who ran away because monsters could be people and people could be monsters and no one believed them when they said which was which.  Nobody wanted them anyway. 

Once upon a time the sister of your heart walked into the void to protect you, and then to protect other things, and the places of power within herself pulled her ever further out of step with the world.  And though you saw her less and less and she walked those paths you loved her still and unchanged.

Once upon a time Roxy brought you your little brother and you held him in your arms and your world shifted on its axis.

Once upon a time she told you a story about demons and endings and beginnings.

You drag yourself across stones and earth and the evening light is dying and you have to find where you need to be before time runs out but you think you may already have reached the limit.  You’re so close, you must be close, but there’s some element missing from the story you need to create and you can’t see what it is.  The rock face above gives way under your seeking hands.  You hardly notice the shower of broken stones that rains down upon you.  You keep climbing because you can’t stop, can’t give up, can’t finish here.

The crow lights on the slope before you, dropping a short, broken off branch.  A half-dozen berries nestle in the leaves.  The bird caws, a soft, sand-sliding sound, and you blink blearily back, unable to speak.  Its feathers are almost entirely white.  Its eyes blaze with the soul behind them, the golden gleam almost incandescent, like a candle flaming brighter right before it goes out.

Your heart clenches hard.  _No_.  Not yet, not like this.  You’ll climb forever if you have to.

But the crow’s life is flickering out, burned through, used up on the pyre of the soul within. And a soul can’t continue without a body to sustain it.

 _No._ No time left, no place or power to bargain, and you did it wrong, you messed up somewhere, you didn’t try hard enough, and even though you know this must be the end there’s no part of you that can accept that you’ve failed.

It occurs to you that there’s still one more living body here, one vessel suited to carry a human soul.

But only one.

You carried him when he was small.

You reach out your hand, toward the bird.

The crow skips back an uncertain hop.  Opens its beak; caws a single, reproachful noise. “ _Bro_.”

Your voice is gone, but you find a curve for your lips. _It’s all right_ , you think. _It’s all right, li’l bro.  I’ll fix it._   You touch the feathers.

And that final, missing element slots into place. Power washes over you. The world aligns--and the landscape changes.

It's like passing through the surface of a soap bubble or a still, clear pool of water, only to find yourself on the other side and in the same place all over again.  Except you haven't moved and it's not the same place.  The air in your lungs feels strange, your skin feels electrified, as if a nearly intangible pressure has lifted.  There's a woman in front of you and she's dark/light (green) and human/not-human (demon?) and when she stoops down before you her smile is sweet and ordinary and welcoming (...dangerous?).

Oh.  You made it after all.  Right place, right time.  ( _Right story_.)

The last traces of light are fading from the sky and your mind seems to be fading with it. You think you feel arms scoop you up, as easily as if you were a child, feel hands soothing across your injuries, the reassuring murmur of voices.  ...More than one?

You can almost imagine that one of them is Roxy.

 _It’s not quite the end yet, Di-Stri_ , she tells you.  _But you’ve made a good start_.

The crow nestles warm and alive over your heart, feathers pressed close.  Just for a little while, you let yourself be carried. 

Just for now.

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: approximately 90% less angst, guaranteed. Also: Caliborn.
> 
> This is technically a prequel to [Stray Dogs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183518) which is a prequel to that trolls-with-wolves fic I am totally going to write when I manage to stop going backwards.
> 
> There were better titles I could have picked, but this one has like three obscure puns and/or dumb references in it; points if you can guess them.


	2. When

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which demons are dangerous and Bro plays to win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter two of three. Now with 100% more asshole snake-demon. :3
> 
>  Many thanks to [rollerskatinglizard](http://rollerskatinglizard.tumblr.com) and [terminallyuninspired](http://terminallyuninspired.tumblr.com) for beta. <3

You come awake in darkness.

“Dave—“ You don’t think, just scrabble, pushing against the softness around you until you achieve a sitting position.  There’s a flutter of motion by your heart.  The crow tumbles loose into your lap, wings flapping until it finds a stable perch on your knee.  It makes a hoarse cough.  You touch the warm spot on your chest, then stoop to look more closely at the crow.

The bird is a white shape in the darkness, its feathers snow bright and emptied of color.  The eyes, though.  The eyes still gleam from within when it cocks its head to look at you, flame-gold and knowing.  You reach out, carefully, with your power and find that soul-flame burning steady, holding at that final brightness that should have used up the raw fuel of the crow’s life long since. 

The crow runs its beak carefully along a slice in your forearm and you look down to find that although the flesh is still angry-looking, the blood flow has stopped and dried.  What wounds you have seem no longer threatening--not healed, but clean and closed, scabbed neatly over as if you hadn’t dragged yourself up a mountainside.  You’re both—unchanged, somehow, here in this place and you let out a shaky breath even as the hairs on the back of your neck rise.

You peer into the darkness.

It’s not as black as you thought. 

You push your shades up into your hair, your eyes slowly adjusting—or maybe the light is increasing?  You can’t tell where the illumination is coming from.  A chamber stretches out before you, a vast, organic space ribbed through with tall pillars that stretch between ceiling and floor.

Stone walls curve into the darkness and vanish, not blocks, but solid, like a cave’s.  Like the inside of a mountain, or a world.  It gives the chamber a hollowed out feeling, like a space stolen where it shouldn’t exist.

And everywhere you look, objects of all types form clusters and piles: tall golden urns amid slumping chests of drawers; stacks of furs mixed with silk and rags; empty bottles and pottery shards heaped with faceted gems.  It’s like some madcap treasure trove—a cross between a junk drawer and a sultan’s vault—and all of it stretching away into this unlit space that is not-exactly-lightless.

You’re on a bed—wide and soft; crisp, cotton sheets—and that may be the strangest thing that has happened to you since this story began.

An arm’s length away, Dave’s body is beside you in the bed.  He looks, for the first time, more like he is sleeping than like he is dead, but his form is so still, far too still, no breath disturbing that frame.  His clothes are clean, the dark, spreading stain gone from his shirt.  The finger-length gash above his heart remains, the killing wound open and bloodless beneath.

Your head spins, your own breath caught somewhere behind your ribcage.

The crow shifts on your knee, clacks its beak to call back your attention.

You blink, twice.  You hold out your finger to it, get a gentle nip of acknowledgement.  You smooth the finger along the crow’s head and back. 

“All right then, li’l man,” you say to no one that can answer.  It takes you two tries to find your voice. It sounds sandpaper-y and strange in your ears, but it works—and that’s a tool.  “Let’s go and finish this story.”

The crow cocks its head, eyes bright and alien upon you, and then flutters off your knee as you rise.  It swoops out ahead of you into room, white shape bobbing and vanishing into the dark like a fae light into the marshes.  You fight the urge to call it back.  Instead, you turn to the task you came here for.

You’ve found the lair.  Now you just need your demon.

(Every tale well told has its price.)

You can’t follow the wall directly, not with all the accumulated treasure and debris that litters the floor in odd heaps and clusters, but you pick your way along the circumference of the space nonetheless.  There are colors and designs worked onto the walls, but you can’t make sense of them from this close.  Doors break the curving stone at odd angles; half are open, half are closed.  You eye the closed portals uneasily.  They don’t have knobs.  Peering through the open doors, you find only single chambers, dead-ended and dark, filled with yet more odds and ends.  No sign of an exit.

You didn’t come to this place looking for that kind of exit anyway.

You leave the wall behind you and weave your way out into the unknown, through the honeycomb of pillars, towards a clearer space, and a long, ornately carved table at what you think is the center of the room.  There’s a mural set above it, on circular tracks—the flat disc a stylized representation of the sky, with day and night divided into two halves.  The moon and stars stand in primacy, each point glowing brightly, casting a cool pool of light onto the table below. 

Something rolls under your foot, and you stoop to pick it up without thinking.  It’s a stone chess piece, the smooth white marble cold and heavy in your fingers.  Your thumb finds the teeth of her crown, the long line of the sword held vertically in front.

The queen’s role in the game is to do whatever must be done.

You close your hand hard around the piece.  You turn your eyes to the table, where an abandoned chess game stands in disarray: board wildly askew, pieces scattered across tabletop and out into the mess of the room.  Several chairs are tipped over, and one lies partially smashed and rent by deep gouges.

Like claws, you think, uneasily, and then fall completely still as goosebumps rise all along your neck.

Something moves, out of sight beyond the pillars.  There’s a sliding noise, like the soft _shuff_ of metal brushing stone.  You edge back towards the table, eyes straining against the dark, and wish, urgently, for your sword, forgotten in the dirt and blood of a roadside a world away.

No.  You came here to make a bargain.

You came here to _fix_ things.

(You came here to pay the cost of your fuck ups.)

The shape you can’t quite see twists another row of columns closer, and a single, massive coil catches the light, black scales the size of your palm gleaming dully before vanishing again into the dark.

You back up until you feel the rim of the table bite into your legs.  _Demon_ , you think.  _Serpent_. 

(“Cherubs,” you can hear Roxy’s voice, in memory, cheerful and lecturing: “Storykeepers, fate-weavers, truth-speakers.  The beast that eats its own tail.  _Kiiiind_ of like snakes.  ’Cept, you know.  Also not.”)

Twin points of red glint at you, eyes set in a head at least as wide your shoulders.  Wide enough to swallow you whole.  Your heart hammers in your chest so hard that it actually hurts. 

The rapid-fire, living rhythm of it reminds you why you can’t bolt.

You’re here to make a deal.

You steady your breathing and stand your ground and clutch the stone queen because you have nothing else to hold onto and you need the reminder.

The demon circles closer, and it’s a dark, twisting shape, at least half the width of the room.  Closer still, and your eyes have a moment of confusion, because you can see that massive, diamond head, patterned red and green on black, but also a different shape, printed just as real against the dark.  And then a moment later the creature sliding out of the dark has the torso of a man and the abdomen of a serpent.  And—wings?  Large and folded, white-feathered shapes stark against the hard black of skin and scales.

The demon moves into the pool of light beneath the sky-mural, circling the table on soft, shuffing ripples of scales, face somehow not quite human behind a gleaming green half-mask, eyes slightly too large and too fixed and too unblinking upon you.

You turn to track him.  Every instinct in your head hums predator, buzzes with the desire for fight or flight.  You brace your knees.  Somewhere in you is your distance, your own bland-faced mask, your separation from the world.  You learned as a child how to stand before monsters and give them nothing of yourself.  You can stand before this being, whatever he might be.

He circles back in front of you, passing close enough to have you pressed back against the table edge again.  Close enough you’re surprised you can’t _feel_ the press of those dark coils, looping in a loose semi-circle around you.  His red eyes still don’t blink.  Those alien eyes are hard to read, but he looks down the broad, nearly flat plane of his nose at you like you’re the last bite of food on the plate and he can’t decide if he should eat you or toss you out with the trash.  At this distance you can see the individual scales of what you took for a mask, the green pattern of them like a stylized skull, blending seamlessly into the smooth black skin of his temples, scalp, jawline. 

Smaller red scales pick out finer detailing amid the green, glinting in the light like beads of blood, like the red eyes that nearly glow, like the dark, black wells of his pupils with the strange fire of his soul, far, far behind them…

The crow swoops out of the darkness to land on your shoulder, noisy flutter of its arrival shaking you back to yourself.

You blink.  The demon is very, very close.  Kissing close, killing close, and you’d like to run away but the table’s at your back, and running’s not really your thing anyway.

The crow shifts on your shoulder, puffing its feathers aggressively.

You came here for a reason.

Right.  Can’t run, can’t fight.  Prefer not to be eaten.

You make your voice mild, instead, and get _more_ in his space.  “So, hey.  We dancing, here?”

The demon abandons you in a liquid swirl of motion.  Yanking out one of the few undamaged chairs he drops into it in a huffy slouch, like a tyrant on a throne.  His white wings sprawl out behind him, wide around the tall, narrow chairback, and his—your brain has another one of those confused moments of double vision—legs sprawl in front.  He looks entirely human-shaped, now, even though he still doesn’t look human. 

He glowers at you from his chair and you eye him back, pondering the three different stories your eyes have told you tonight. 

(Serpent, naga, man.)

“Which one is real?” you ask, without thinking.

The demon blinks once, and you’re startled, because you’d half convinced yourself he couldn’t.  Black lips curl in a sneer around a row of long golden fangs. 

“Which of _your_ pathetic shapes.  Is real?” His voice has a rusty hiss, and his words start and stop like he’s out of practice speaking, or can’t quite decide if he wants to be bothered.  Gold jewelry shifts as he leans to prop his chin on one palm.  “The one that crawls and whimpers and mewls?  The one that totters.  And crumbles from age?  The one that stands before me.  Amid all that is mine.  In sheerest insolence?”

That has the ring of a riddle.  Or maybe a threat.  You choose your words carefully.  “I guess… all of them, maybe.  At different times.”  Infant to elder, birth to death.  You suppose that makes you the one standing in sheerest insolence.  You wonder if it would be insolent to ask if he really can’t tell the difference. 

“You really can’t tell the difference?”

The contemptuous curl of the demon’s lip increases.  It displays a frankly alarming amount of fang.  There is something strange about the way his jaw hinges, about the stretch of his mouth, like it might slit all the way back to his ears. “I don’t _care_.  About your stunted little timeline.  Human _snack_.”

…Perhaps you should try harder to not offend the snake-demon.

On your shoulder, the crow squalls a low, angry noise, hunched in close by your ear.  Protective and seeking protection.  Somewhere out in the dark, your little brother’s body only _looks_ like it is sleeping.

You’re too cold inside to stay afraid. 

You have too much at stake to back down.

“Are you planning to eat me?” you ask, just to get it on the table.

The demon rolls his head back to look at the ceiling mural, apparently dismissing you completely in the depths of his boredom.   “My _sister_.  Has granted you your pilgrimage.”  He selects a fallen game piece absently from the table, rolls it between two delicately claw-tipped fingers. “You have until the end.  Of one day and one night.  Or until you violate our hospitality.  Or until you give away your death.”  A claw flicks and the white pawn vanishes, out into the darkness.  “Whichever comes soonest.”

“Fun.”  You’re not quite daring enough to hamper your movements with a chair of your own, but you slide your hands in your pockets and slant one hip against the table edge, casual and—yes—insolent.  You use the tools you have.  “Am I allowed to leave?”

“I don’t give.  Two merciful shits what you do.  But you won’t find an exit ‘til day.” Bracelets clink as he snags another fallen chess piece from the table—a bishop this time—and holds it up to the light.  “My _sister_ locks me in.”  He slants you one brief glance down green scaled cheekbones, before returning to his pretense of ignoring you, the faintest cruel upturn to his lips.  “Apparently I’m not” —the hiss of his voice grows more pronounced—“ _nice_.”

You think that you should be frightened—and you are, somewhere.  Down low in your gut and along your spine and through each electric taut nerve you are terrified.  But your screaming survival instincts are just one part of you, and they are not the part of you that carried your brother’s body up a mountainside, and they are not the part of you that watched your brother bleed and die on a road.

You don’t need to leave.  You just need to _win_. 

You’ve always had a knack for success in high stakes situations.

“Your sister.”  The demon twitches, a jump of black skin and the rustle of white feathers.  You pretend not to notice.  “I think I met her on the way in.  She the one playing tiddlywinks with space?”

He doesn’t favor you with an answer.

“And you’re time.”

Further silence.  But he’s listening, you’re sure he’s listening.  You can feel it each time you grab another shred of his attention, because it lights through your nerves like a brand.

“I want to make a deal with you.”  You mean it to sound casual, but your heart trips a beat and your scabbed-over wounds twinge, and your whole body clenches with the sick urgency of your need.  ( _Fix it, fix it, I’ll fix it, li’l bro_.  _Don’t be scared_.)

“Dave—“ you say, and then get stuck.

The demon lifts his head, dropping the stone figure to one side.  He might be marble himself, for the way he stares at you, eyes flat and bored and inhuman behind the green skull pattern of his scales.  When you can’t make your throat work immediately, he slouches in his chair, wings spreading behind him.  The black-brown curve of his scalp reflects muted jewel tones as he tilts his head.  “The piece of meat.”

Rage flares up in you like dry tinder igniting; a quick, consumptive blaze, leaving you all ashes.  “My brother,” is all you let yourself say, in the end, voice a correction.

“Yes,” the demon says, and the hiss of his voice caresses the word, lingers on it.  “Your dead piece of meat.  Heart pierced.  Soul out of place.  Husk empty.  He would be rotting.  If I allowed time in this place.”  The demon actually smiles now, red eyes bright and interested on you, leaning forward onto his knees to observe you better.  “Would that.  _Distress_ you?  I could eat him for you.  Before the night ends.  I’d do that much.  For free.”

He’s fishing for a reaction, so you do your best not to give him one.  “I want you to give him his life back.”

The demon’s head tilts a second time.  You’re reminded of a snake, sizing up prey.  “His timeline has ended.”  The words are flat, an indifferent declaration of fact.  His head cocks the other direction.  “I could splint on a new one.  We could watch him bleed.  And die.  Again.  That would be funny.”

“ _No_ ,” you say, and it comes out sharper, rawer than you intended.  The crow makes soft hoarse noises and preens at a lock of your hair.  You reach for your poise, your cool.  “No.  I want you to fix him.  All the way.  Or am I aiming too far out of your league?” 

As verbal manipulation goes, it’s schoolyard quality baiting, but the demon curls his lip at you anyway, wings mantling in offense. 

He eyes you narrowly.  “You are very demanding.  For a human snack.  That has offered.  _Nothing_.”

“I’ll make my bargains when you show me something I want.”

The demon stares at you for a long, silent moment.  Your shades are still in your hair, eyes bared to the dark, but you meet that stare and refuse to back down.

In the end, he looks away first.  He stands to pace a restless circuit, circling the table.  Circling you.  “Your little dead piece of meat’s heart.  Is destroyed.  Stupid mortal snack.  Do you think I would give to him.  From my own?  Should I trade away all my life.  Or suffer him here. Beside me.  For eons?”  He slides to a stop in front of you, reared up on a ring of muscular black coils again.  “What the fuck could you possibly offer.  That would be worth any portion of my heart?”

“He can have mine.”

The demon blinks.

“You said fix his time and replace his heart and he’ll be fine, right?  So give him mine.  Problem solved.”

The crow, gone tense and still, erupts. 

It shrieks exactly once.  Then it’s a dizzying storm of white feathers beating at your face, your ears filled with the sound of wings.  You don’t raise your hands to defend yourself and you don’t try to move away.  You just bear up under the tide of outrage, because you have to, you have to.  You didn’t even think before you spoke the words, and you think it’s because you’ve known from the moment you saw that arrow shaft how far you were willing to go.

(You _failed,_ you _promised_.)

(You’ll fix it.)

You don’t defend yourself and the crow doesn’t do the damage it could do, just buffets you with wings in a furious cloud, before breaking away to sweep back out into the darkness.

You watch it go.

The demon, you realize, is laughing.

“Yes, fucking excellent. He dies for you.  And _you_.  Die for him.” The demon looks up at you from where he has doubled over, hands supporting himself against a serpent’s underbelly, the belted loincloth at his waist the only thing preventing you from seeing how dark skin meets darker scales. His red eyes glitter with humor.  His gold-fanged smile is wide and full of malice. “So poetic.  So circular.  So very … _sweet._ Throw his sacrifice.  Right back in his face.”  He straightens, still half laughing, and sways closer.  “I’m almost.  Tempted.”

Your heart is doing that rapid, painful thump in your chest again.  It doesn’t quite feel like terror.

“But you still haven’t told me.  Why I should trouble myself.  For _you_.”

 You breathe in. 

“A life for a life,” you say, easy—and maybe you’ve spent too much of your life at odds with the world, because this is where you’ve always felt most at home—here in this moment after all the numerous and assorted footwear has dropped and there’s just the fight.  It’s easy now, to slip onto that knife-bright, adrenaline edge of calm, of perfection.  Of certainty in how the odds must fall out.  “Sounds fair to me, bro.”

The demon glides a half-twist to the side, observing you through narrowed eyes.  Considering the long length of curving snake tail still spread in front of you, this does not actually do much to unpin you from your spot against the table.

“You’ve already.  Promised away your death.  Stupid snack.  It’s too late to bargain with that.  Or was that a lie?” That razorblade smile stretches again. 

(He thinks he has you, but he’s _interested_ , and that means you have _him_.) 

“You could make it so,” the demon hisses, a low, sibilant purr. “Would you like to find out what happens.  If you break hospitality.  By lying. To _me_?”

You smile back at him, just a mild, upward slice of lips.  “Pass, thanks.” 

He blinks. 

Internally, you add one to the tally.  Your smile turns up just a tiny bit more.  You turn your pin into a perch, setting your ass casually on the table and crossing your legs at the knee.  “A’ight, so.  If you don’t want to bargain… how about a gamble?”

The demon’s head …tilts.

You gesture behind you to the table, the scattered pieces, the spilled-over board.  “There still enough of whatever this mess is to play a game?”

The demon’s face is strange and cold and unreadable behind skull-pattern green scales, his jaw set, his dark lip curled in a sneer.  But you watch his pupils dilate, watch that flicker of interest flare and take hold in his eyes and think:

_Gotcha._

(It’s not sure; it’s still maybe; there’s still the end to get to.  But, for the first time in a long, terrible twenty four hours, there’s something new shivering high in your abdomen—a tiny thrill of victory, maybe, of possibility, of bait on the hook.) 

(—You’re going to _win._ )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for sticking with me on this one; I know it plays a bit different than my usual style. 
> 
> One more should wrap it up. Only happy endings, I promise. (...for Bro & Caliborn standards of happy.)


End file.
